The Queen Can Stitch You Up
by pecfert
Summary: AU - In which Julia is queen of Chester's Mill, Diane "Barbie" Barbara is her bullheaded knight, and gets injured, and Julia sews her up. Genderswap.


"You, Barbie, are one of the most foolish, obstinate, reckless knights I have ever met! It's a wonder you aren't dead!" Julia snapped at Barbie as she dragged the injured woman down the hallway to her chambers.

"Well, excuse me, Queen Julia, for trying to protect you from that assassin!" Barbie retorted.

"Oh, don't take that tone with me, _Barbara_." Julia glared at her, tugging her past the other guards stationed at her door, who rolled their eyes at each other as Julia pulled Barbie into her room. The moment the door slammed shut, Julia's demeanor shifted from one of rage and exasperation to one of concern.

Her eyes roamed over Barbie's shoulder, which had been nicked by an arrow that had been shot at Julia during the Julia's coronation ceremony hours earlier. In the commotion that followed Barbie pushing Julia out of the way, and apprehending the villain - Paul Randolph, something like that, but who cared, anyways, as long as he was sentenced to many years in prison - Barbie hadn't gotten the time to be treated, so Julia was doing it now. Although there were many doctors who could treat her, Julia perferred to do it herself, because when she was younger she was quite the danger junkie, and started to learn how to patch her and her late brother Peter up when they acted like buffoons, so she knew a thing or two about injuries.

As Julia guided Barbie to the foot of the bed, Barbie all but sagged in Julia's seemingly iron grip. She groaned as Julia cut open the coarse material of her shirt to get to the wound.

"I'm gonna be okay, Jules, I'm in your hands." Barbie smiled thinly at Julia, whose furrowed brows and frown did nothing to relieve her. Although Barbie wasn't in an excruciating amount of pain when she kept her arm still, when she moved her arm in the slighted direction outwards, her arm would send out a spark of white hot pain into her body. Which, of course, in retrospect, was quite bad, but Barbie had endured much worse. The look that was on Julia's face, though, made Barbie feel like her injury was very severe. "Julia, honey, I'm going to be okay, right?"

Julia's eyes flicked from her face to her wound and back again. "It's not deep, but it's wide, and I can stitch it back up, but..."

"But what, darling? I can take it." Barbie chewed on her lip, a habit Julia knew Barbie did when she was anticipating bad news.

"But it's going to get infected, if it hasn't been already, because you've been running around like a lunatic. The shot happened around midmorning. It's almost dusk. You didn't clean it as soon as it happened - I'm not blaming you for that - it was madness afterwards, and -"

"Okay."

"Oh-okay?" Julia stuttered.

"It might get infected. That's okay. These things happen." Barbie schooled her expression into that of a neutral, unaffected one. But Julia had been with Barbie long enough to see right through the act.

"_Diane_." Julia only ever pulled out Barbie's real name when she was extremely irritated, tired, worried, or angry. "You don't have to put on a brave face for me, okay? I know you're worried and scared."

"_Julia_." With her right arm, Barbie lifted her hand to Julia's face and stroked her thumb against her cheek. Julia leaned in and gave Barbie a chaste kiss before taking out sutures, a needle, cloth, gauze, and a bottle of wine Julia kept for special occasions. This, was not exactly a special occasion - or celebration, for that matter - but it needed to be used.

"This'll probably hurt." Julia uncorked the bottle, and soaked the cloth in wine.

"Thanks, Captain Obvious." Barbie quipped.

"I won't sew you up." She threatened, but as she did so she pressed the cloth to the wound. Barbie gritted her teeth and groaned.

"Damn it..." She winced as Julia pulled the cloth away. "The needle will hurt more, won't it? Wait, don't answer that, I should know."

"I'm sorry, sweetheart." Julia murmured as she threaded the sutures through the eye. Barbie grasped the comforter like it was her lifeline, and started to gnaw at her lower lip. "Here we go." Barbie's knuckles began to turn white from how hard she gripped the bed. The needle pierced the skin, and Barbie had to restrain herself from shuddering. She clenched her jaw and steeled herself as Julia finished the first few stitches and pulled the skin together.

The room was almost silent as Julia sewed Barbie's injury, except for the sound of Barbie's strained breathing Julia's occasional "humph's" when a stitch was crooked. She paused only once to light the candles that were spread haphazardly around her room. The warm glow of the candles along with the rich red and golden tones of the room made Julia stop sewing for a moment - the room reminded her of the time of night it was, and as she studied Barbie's face, which was both haggard and strained, she knew she had to finish up quickly.

The last few stitches took Julia the longest because the gap in the skin was the widest, and when she had to pull the skin together, she didn't want the sutures to snap. They didn't. Julia poured wine over it once more, and carefully wrapped the gauze around it.

"Don't move it, strain it, lay on it, um -" Julia started.

"I got it, Jules, 'Don't mess it up', trust me, I won't. I don't want to have to get sewn up again." She interjected. "But thank you. I know you had other things to do tonight, but you decided to stick with me, and that means a lot to me."

Julia grinned, "Of course I'm going to stick with you, you meathead. I love you and if you're in trouble, I'll be right beside you until it's gone. And I'll be there to stitch you up if need be."

"Huh, the queen can take time out of her royal schedule to stitch me up." Barbie yawned and laid back on the bed.

"Alright, it's time for you to go bed. The best medicine for this kind of injury is sleep. If I wake up and you're not here-"

"I'm not going anywhere unless you want me too."

"You're not going anywhere."

"Now that that's settled, can we please go to sleep?" Barbie stretched as best she could to get comfortable, then flipped over and buried her face in Julia's softest pillow. Julia blew out the candles in her room, changed into nightwear, and maneuvered herself carefully onto the bed in order to not disturb the sleeping knight. As she laid on her back, Barbie threw her right arm over Julia's stomach and mumbled, "I love you, too, you meathead."

Julia smiled as fell asleep.


End file.
